


The Horses Have Gone

by AbandonedWorld



Series: hope is just a stranger wondering how it got so bad [5]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: All the creys, Alternate Universe, Angst, Death, Established Relationship, Heartbreak, Hurt, M/M, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-10
Updated: 2012-03-10
Packaged: 2017-11-01 17:46:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/359575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AbandonedWorld/pseuds/AbandonedWorld
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Involving an accident on the outskirts of Xavier's estate. More specifically, the farmhouse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Horses Have Gone

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry about this sad one. Just came as a thought and yeah, here it is.

Erik couldn't feel his fingers against the cold. 

They were sticky, filthy. Rust-colored stains splattered about–drying now. Blood on his hands again. 

Over there...across from him. Just by a forgotten barn door, there lay a man who's pale blue eyes pointed skyward, empty now. Void and lost. The light had gone from them, slowly at first. But if Erik knew anything well enough to know, death wasn't kind to the dying. Nor the living. 

How could it have been? 

_'Accidents happen...Erik, y-you mustn't blame yourself,'_ Charles had choked out between sobbing breaths. Painful breaths. His _last_ moments with the very air Erik was still heaving in and out of his battered lungs. 

Erik's eyes rose outwards, the shoddy red paint chipped, peeling away from the weather-beaten wood. Dying colors.

The farmhouse, who's entranceway was the one in mention, had been Charles' father's pride and joy. Horses–stallions and studs. Blacks, browns, spotty-whites and tans. A beautiful marriage of earth and life. It was no wonder the old man–who wasn't all that old–had enjoyed spending his free time there. 

Taken over by Xavier's young son at the time of Brian's death, Charles had regretfully left the barn to lay waste. The horses were promptly sold to local equestrians, knowing their lives would be better off. It broke the telepath's heart doing so, but neglect was far too worse an option for Brian's beloved creatures. 

Oftentimes, Charles found himself thinking back to when the horses had gone, how it had taken something from deep within him. As though a piece of his very soul were sold at auction. He hadn't known why, only a regret that would fill him for the longest of times.

But as one does, Charles carried on with life, slowly forgetting about the farmhouse and the beauty it had once held. About the heart that had been built into it. Now, his life was genetics, mutations, knowledge. He simply hadn't the time for such leisures. 

But then something odd happened–wholly unexpected.

Erik arrived. As if by some cosmic chance–or, more like a gale force wind that damn near blew the magnetic mutant through Charles' front door. 

It had been storming that evening too, funnily enough. 

Lehnsherr appeared louder than the thunder that rattled his bones that night, shaking, sodden from tip to toe. His fingers had blood tangled up beneath nails that were chipped and fingertips raw with misspent energy. A fight has happened–a mean one at that. 

Charles rambled on nonsensically, wrapping the abused man in warm blankets, ones smelling of fresh springs and wintry nights. Erik hadn't ever felt so comforted in his entire life. 

Then the "what happened to you's" and "just who _are_ you's" began, questions begetting questions. The young geneticist wanted answers, as would any sane good samaritan. 

Erik had been twenty-three at the time, Charles, twenty-one. 

Honesty was offered; Erik told of his escape from Germany, his fight against a mutant hunter–a man wearing Satan's likeness. His struggles in coming to America, his propensities for finding himself in troublesome situations. Erik admitted to his fondness of alcohol, his proclivities towards angry citizens so that he might have the excuse to fight. 

The German also told Charles of how he hated the man he was turning into. Lonely, full of hatred and fear. Needing a change. And he found it on the night that lead him to Xavier: the bar brawl Erik had barely walked away from with limbs still attached. Those men were ...telekinetic. Erik's own manipulation of metals had been out-smarted by a couple of worthless street rats who were more in tune with their powers than he.

But Erik hadn't regretted it now–now that he was safe here, in Charles' care...his arms. 

For Charles, it wasn't ever a thought, really. Charles knew he couldn't let Erik leave, and Erik, he wanted nothing more than to stay. Not a chance he would allow the man to flee, what with the information Xavier had just been privy too. A lost soul crying out for help? There was a man made of something more. 

Charles was enchanted. 

A partnership ensued, both in front and behind closed doors. The years trolled on. They worked long hours together on research studies, while locating others that might be as similar to them as their genes told as much. It was enthralling, to Charles mainly, but Erik's interest had never waned. 

Their relationship was solid. Trust was something of value, and neither Erik's gifts with metal or Charles' mental machine had ever been called into question between them. Charles wouldn't poke inside or alter Erik in any way, and in turn Erik would never harm Charles–in any capacity. 

But today. 

Today had been just an accident though. 

And yet, there was blood _on_ Erik's hands again. And this time it wasn't from a filthy human's or a Nazi hunter's. It was Charles' own. 

Erik threw up, the heat from his vomit cutting through the ice and snow that lay atop dead grass. 

_Dead._

Tears rushed to Erik's eyes as that word resonated inside of him. Chilling him. A realization setting in.

Charles was dead. He was laying over by that door, unmoving. Nothing left but an empty shell of what had only ever been Erik's...salvation.

How had it all gone wrong? Erik's thoughts, muddied and unkempt, traced the last twenty or so minutes of his life. When everything had spun of control. 

He remembered now: The telepath, with a steamed cup of tea on hand, surprised Erik as he worked inside the farmhouse. There was metal everywhere–that's what the German did on the weekends. Created things, manufactured objects both large and small. For pleasure, for business. It wasn't uncommon for Charles to visit at least once while Erik was out there, but today was...Erik couldn't begin to understand why today was so vastly different. 

_How had it all gone so wrong?_

A flash of memory. Erik saw himself as he overreacted out of instinct–an instinct he hadn't felt in nearly twelve years. The nearest piece of scattered shrapnel soared out and away from his work bench without cause, without effect, cutting through something pliable and sizably substantial. 

Erik turned, knowingly, the moment it sliced through the bottom of Charles' heart. He _felt_ the metal enter, rearrange and exit the geneticists body. It was ...horrific. Understatement.

Throwing up again, Erik eventually found his legs and stumbled back over to Charles'- _when had he left him there alone?_ -stilled form. Grasping now onto anything, everything he could handle. Xavier's hands, face and throat were cold from the wintry air that continued to press in on them from all sides, but his body, arms, legs–those were still so very warm. 

Felt so very alive. 

Erik knew this wasn't to last. The body had a way of changing that in the first couple of days after its cessation of life, but for now it was all the magnetic man had. Failing warmth and dripping blood. Crimson snow. 

Erik would have called for help when he realized what he had done, but it would only have come too late. Rather than risk losing the last moments with his friend and lover and ....Erik chose to stay by Charles' side. 

To be _with_ him as the remaining streams of light left from the sky above–as the last struggled–gargled–gasps of breath pushed out of Xavier's blue lips. It was a sacrifice either way. Get Charles help and Erik might have missed his chance to say "I'm so sorry," or the weeping sounds of his forced "goodbye,don'tgo,pleasestay." To stay beside the dying man meant accepting their fates. 

Erik had chosen to stay, just as he had done when Charles asked him a dozen years prior. 

His hands were warm again, wrapped around Charles' heavy shoulders. The wool of the English man's coat shrouding against the harsh winds of December. 

The blood was pooling onto his thighs now, but Erik didn't care. He lifted the telepath with ease, smelling a hint of Earl Grey on the man's lapels. _'The tea,'_ Erik recalled. He pushed his nose in deeper, letting his eyes fall shut. Remembering the man here, now. His scents, his weight. Even the smell of his blood was....different than Erik had long ago grown accustomed to. 

Sobs broke through Erik's tightly pursed lips as he rounded the corners of the Xavier's farm, heading northward towards the grandiose home. Mansion. Hank would be in the lab, Logan in the training room. Raven would be with Logan. Alex and Sean, TV room. Everyone else, well, Erik didn't care. He didn't even care about the others he had unknowingly listed off inside of his head.

The efforts to distract his mind from thinking about the dead body in his arms was all Erik could to keep moving forward. 

How would he explain this...would he be forced to leave? 

Erik didn't care of the consequences. He only longed for his friend back. 

The aching in his heels becoming too great, Erik's muscles straining against the full weight of his actions, he cursed into the night air but didn't stop. He wouldn't ever, if it meant Charles could remain against him, warm and as he was now.

But that would go against the rules, against nature's power force of protocol. 

Erik found himself at the very door that had once saved his slumbered life. There would be no Charles there this time, no blue-eyed genius waiting with open arms. No scents of fresh springs and wintry eves. There would be a hollowed out hole, gaping from his catastrophic loss. 

He opened the door without moving a single muscle. 

Erik closed his eyes as he entered the home, every cell in his body screaming for his own death. To lay beside his partner so that Charles wouldn't be alone. 

"Erik?" A voice, tentative, unsure. 

It was Hank. He wasn't in the lab after all. 

"Erik, I heard a scream not two minutes ago. Are you alright?" The young man's voice was getting nearer to Erik now, footsteps coming quick. 

Lehnsherr couldn't move, realizing it must have been his own cries of emotional pain that lead to the blood curdling scream Hank was referencing. 

His body was as dead as Charles' was to any willful commands. 

Hank rounded in front of him, worried eyes dropping to the motionless Charles. The blood-convered Charles. He watched as Hank's jaw unhinged, as the scientist's feet stumbled back a few paces–as the settlement that something very wrong had happened here flashed across the man's face.

Erik couldn't think of anything else to say in that moment, than the memory of Charles' farmhouse. One shared with him during their many nights spent tangled between the cotton sheets of Xavier's bedroom together. Talking of their triumphs, their heartbreaks. 

"Hank....the horses have gone."


End file.
